From Magritte to Klossowski: The Simulacrum, between Painting and Narrative

Abstract

The painting itself is well known. It is Magritte's second version of Ceci n'est pas une pipe (entitled Les deux mysteres), in which the drawing of a pipe restssurrounded, along with its rebellious caption, by a frame-upon an easel. Beneath it lies the well-worn floor of what could only be a schoolroom. Above it floats a pipe that would in every way be identical to the first but for its strange location and its enormous size. To explicate the meaning of these images, Foucault will tell a little story. But to do so, he will have to conjure up a figure nowhere visible in the painting itself: a schoolmaster (un maitre) lecturing to his students. All the elements of the painting will now reappear in the classroom of Foucault's narrative. The image in the frame will appear again, but this time as the illustration of the schoolmaster's thesis. Only the words beneath it on the blackboard will be transformed, having been restored to their denominative function. Within the narrative, the words will respond, if only for a moment, to the schoolmaster's wishes. They will name the object of his demonstration: This is a pipe. No sooner has he pronounced these fatal words than the schoolmaster begins to stammer like a guilty schoolboy. For something has gone wrong: he has not quite shown precisely what he wants to say. A man of the old school, he acts as if the image of the pipe on the blackboard and the sentence by which he named it were bound to an original pipe existing independently of his demonstration, but which both its words and its images are assumed to resemble. It is this implicit resemblance that he hopes to show the students in his demonstration. In return, he will ask only that they recognize it, both in the images they see and in the words they read. But as his lecture moves toward its promised climax, he begins to suspect that he has failed in his task. He cannot shake the feeling that his words and images are less clearly linked than he might have hoped. The relation of resemblance that should bind both the drawing and the name of the pipe to their common referent is, unlike those words and images themselves, nowhere visible in the classroom.